Tourist on a Hardened Lava Flow, Hawaii Volcanoes, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Tourist on a Hardened Lava Flow, Hawaii Volcanoes, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Tourist on a Hardened Lava Flow, Hawaii Volcanoes, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-9DD846

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A man in a light shirt climbs to the top of a black lava hummock to get a better view, doing what every visitor to a national park in the 1960s did the moment a ranger said the ground was safe now: walked directly onto the thing that had recently been liquid rock. Around him the flow has cooled into the kind of jagged, glassy waves that look decorative from a car window and turn an ankle up close. The dead, bark-stripped trees still standing at the flow's edge were alive when this lava arrived, and nobody thought to warn him that a forest can be killed standing up.

A scatter of new ferns pushes up through the cracks, doing the slow work of turning a disaster into a hiking trail, which is roughly how Hawaii's national park promoted itself in this era. The man's pose is pure vacation snapshot, hands loose, chin up, admiring a geological event the way other people admired a canyon or a waterfall. He has no way of knowing that the ground under his shoes is a single dated chapter in an ongoing argument between the mountain and the trees, and that the argument is not over.

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